True North Conference: Celebrating 20 Years of Dignified Care

This post was written by Alyssa Yeragotelis & Ruth Katzman

Introduction

Craig, Ruth, and Alyssa attended the True North Conference: Celebrating 20 Years of Dignified Care at the Waltham Woods Conference Center in Waltham, MA.

The conference featured presentations from distinguished speakers including Ross Ellenhorn, MSW, PhD (CEO and Founder), Alejandro Chaoul, PhD, Andrew Tatarsky, PhD, Dorothy Hutchinson, ScD, CPRP, CFRP, and Lindsay Dow, MBA, CRPS.

Beyond celebrating Ellenhorn's two decades of care, each speaker explored the critical importance of dignity in therapeutic practice, contrasted with cases of dehumanization that inspired Ellenhorn's mission to understand each client from a holistic perspective—one that honors autonomy and respect.

"Honoring the Dignity of Risk: How Autonomy Drives Growth and Healing in Clinical Care" by Ross Ellenhorn

Dr. Ellenhorn, renowned for his eclectic perspectives on effective intervention, founded Ellenhorn after discovering a troubling lack of dignity for patients throughout the interventional establishment. Understanding dignity as integral to successful outcomes, he first sought to operationalize the term, then contextualize it within evidence-based practice.

What he found was striking: while literature on evidence-based practice presupposed dignity as essential to ethical and effective work, this stood in stark contrast to his observations of standard intervention practices.

This dissociation between interventional reality and theoretical perspective informed his definition of dignity as a practice rooted in the Enlightenment movement and integral to Western civilization's development. The discrepancy he observed stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of the term.

Dignity is a call to action, not an intellectual checkbox. When clients are allowed to grow, make mistakes independently, and take risks, they are more likely to meet interventional goals and report higher quality of life.

This understanding is fundamental to our work at Reset Boston and, frankly, underscored our motivation to attend this conference. While it can be challenging—and at times anxiety-provoking—to give our clients space to grow, it is essential for creating lasting change. We hope our clients don't respond to our intervention through mirroring based on a lack of autonomy, but rather through a collaborative process of increasing personal efficacy alongside their coaches.

"And Then: Dignity of Risk" by Dorothy Hutchinson

Dr. Hutchinson offered a poignant reflection on her interventional development, juxtaposing her training with the dominant interventional culture of the time, which emphasized performing interventions without considering a person's macro environment. Upon working with clients, Hutchinson immediately found this approach unfeasible. To adapt effectively, she had to learn how to account for each client's perspective, defying her perception of the "right way" to offer intervention. Now, as an established academic and interventionist, she considers this realization integral to her approach.

While we at Reset Boston don't claim Hutchinson's level of expertise, we find her reflection deeply relevant to our observations and values when working with students. Understanding a student as a holistic culmination of many relevant factors, identities, and experiences allows us to better support the development of motivation, resilience, and insight.

"Dignified Care for People with Cancer through Tibetan Mind-Body Practice" by Alejandro Chaoul

Alejandro Chaoul spoke about his unique educational journey: training in Tibetan mind-body yogic practices in monasteries in India and Nepal, clinical and research experience, and his personal journey in health, wellbeing, and spirituality.

His content drew from integrative medicine, medical humanities, and a Buddhist perspective. His work emphasized the importance of mind, body, and spiritual connection—both with oneself and with others—as a significant paradigm in healing. Human services workers aren't just working with a client; the client is a whole person with expertise in their own lived experience. This must be taken into consideration during their healing journey.

At Reset Boston, we take a whole-person, or holistic, approach when working with students. Although we work with a vastly different population, we connected deeply with Chaoul's ideas about actively listening to, considering, and supporting patients based on their experience—rather than controlling and prescribing, which strips clients of dignity and autonomy.

"Centering Dignity: The Transformational Power of Harm Reduction Therapy" by Andrew Tatarsky

Dr. Tatarsky is an outspoken advocate for the harm reduction paradigm as integral to effective substance use disorder (SUD) intervention. Acknowledging the "trendiness" of the term, he delineated how this paradigm creates an interventional framework for effective psychotherapy and distinguished harm reduction as the implicit framework underlying his intervention, Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy (IHRP).

Dr. Tatarsky emphasized that those seeking SUD intervention are often traumatized when seeking care—either through systems of forced institutionalization that are recommended liberally across interventional contexts, or more broadly through an implicit framing of shame and symptomatology. Etiologically, an SUD differs from normative behavior through an overt pathological framework that acknowledges a loss of inhibition and inability to regulate compulsive use. When approaching a client with an SUD, overly punitive or harsh interventions create secondary pathologies related to trauma that worsen outcomes and complicate intervention.

Reset Boston has collaborated with multidisciplinary teams of helping professionals who utilize IHRP or ground their work within the broader harm reduction paradigm. Ultimately, we understand that one interventional approach doesn't fit all. Rather than claiming confidence in any single approach, we have worked to create literacy in SUD intervention across the spectrum to better serve our clients' goals.

"From Lived Experience to Lasting Change: Designing for Patient Dignity" by Lindsay Dow

Lindsay Dow offered a compelling and vulnerable account of her journey seeking healing from significant mental health challenges. Out of respect for her anonymity—given that she was speaking to colleagues—the most poignant and appropriate takeaway to share was her experience as a patient.

She situated the positive trajectory of her journey as predicated on establishing a sense of responsibility and dignity that extended beyond intellectual acknowledgment. In partnership with her clinician, she first sought to achieve a lived sense of these factors, thereby creating the groundwork for effective treatment.

Years later, she is now a senior interventionist and owner of a company that develops effective tools for joint therapist-client interaction. These tools not only create more effective information sharing that automates reports for clinicians—effectively creating continuity of care outside of sessions without requiring unmanageable hours—but also allow clients to actively participate in their treatment.

At Reset, we also strive to create systems that allow our clients to engage with structure and coaching outside of sessions. Some of these strategies include completing daily goal-oriented behaviors within a system that is analyzed during sessions. This can be a helpful tool in creating consistent growth; rather than reactively approaching issues of effectiveness in short intervals, we can frame progress as a long-term process supported by regular, but not excessive, points of introspection.

Concluding Thoughts

Some may argue that these values are shared by most everyone in human services. While this point is true, factors outside of a clinician's control—including health insurance parity, institutional culture, dominant cultural considerations, and the implementation of national policy—create systems that are well-meaning but often traumatizing to those in crisis.

Through the lens of dignity-rooted care, human services workers can minimize the harm caused to their clients during crisis situations and create pathways toward genuine healing and growth.